Ashop Commerce Ecommerce Blog

Compelling Imagery and Scheduling in Targeted Advertising

Picking right back up from where we left off in our last post about creating effective targeted advertising emails, you want your messages to amiably assail the senses. If you’ve followed the instructions in our last post, your target marketing content should already sound like music to your listener’s ears. Now it’s time to make it easy on the eyes. There are some rules of thumb you need to follow. So let’s get cracking.

Consistency is Key

Start by being consistent. It helps to build your brand if you can associate an image or color scheme with your company. It might be worthwhile to do some psychology and behavioral marketing research in this regard. There are some very well-known correlations between behavior and color. Red, for example is known to increase appetite as well as impulsiveness, whereas blue produces feelings of serenity, and helps put customer’s minds at ease. These are handy facts if you’re looking to sell something.

You can also use this opportunity to visually complement your message. If you’re advertising a product, it’s a no-brainer that you would want an attractive image displaying its fine details. Or perhaps you could show a situation in which your product or service is being used and enjoyed by a family of smiling urbanites. However you decide to best highlight the utility of your products or services, but you must be careful to convey a message without simply being flashy. Flash without substance won’t create conversions nearly as well. It’s also important to remember that just like your text, image choices should be directly informed by the metric data that you’ve gathered, as well as the conclusions you’ve drawn about your clientele.

Images Can Increase Clickthroughs
Whatever images you decide to fill your email with, they shouldallbeclickable. Remember that one of the main goals of any email is to drive traffic to your site. In terms of picture perfect propriety, having an image that directly links to a landing page just makes sense. Images are also an excellent opportunity to throw in some less intrusive calls to action. To do this, set your images up to display a pop up box directing the recipient to the desired course of action.

For example, say you owned an ecommerce store, let’s say an online bait shop. You’ve theoretically sent an email with an image of a seasoned fisherman fitting a colorful plastic fish hook to his line. When the mouse scrolls over the image, it should link directly to the hook’s product page with a short and sweet CTA, implying that the reader should: “Prepare to haul in a big catch by purchasing the Acme Bass-o-matic fish lure.”

If you’ve correctly targeted your angling aficionados, then they may go ahead to your site without bothering to read the rest of your message. This is your goal in the end anyway. A picture is worth a thousand words, so why not use your pictures as actionable items in your target marketing emails?

Sticking to a Schedule
Once you’ve developed an idea for the process behind putting together effective emails, it’s a good idea to decide on a time to send them. Being out of sight is directly connected to being out of mind, so it’s important to keep your brand consistently on your customer’s radar.

There are a few ways to go about this. The most popular is to send them out on a schedule. Daily, weekly, or monthly emails are sure to keep your customer’s engaged, so long as they are well-crafted. However, you run the risk of bombarding your recipient with too many messages, and end up annoying them. This is especially true for the daily blasts.

Yet you don’t want to spend too much time between messages either. Monthly is on the other end of the spectrum, and is probably the maximum time you would like to spend between emails. Any longer, and you risk being an unmemorable addition to your client’s inbox, and may end up being marked as spam.

You can send out targeted advertising sporadically and still achieve commendable results, but this can lead to disorganization and confusion on either end of the relationship between you and your clients. It all depends on how you work best, but in general keeping to a schedule is a proven method of increasing sales.

On the other hand, you could perform your content targeting with pinpoint precision, by automating email templates to go out whenever a client’s activity matches certain filters in the data that you’re tracking. Let’s say that the same customer has purchased 25 items in a month from your online store; you could have an email template set up to thank them for their loyal shopping habits.

After all, it’s nice to be appreciated.

Depending on the scenario, this kind of filtered automatic emailing would often require a user subscription.

Hopefully, this comprehensive guide to crafting effective target marketing emails has helped you get a feel for the process. Though if you’re still not feeling ultra-confident, you can stay tuned for the next post. Part 3 of our series on targeted emails will examine some in-depth examples of successful campaigns that have been used to create conversions to great effect in the past.

We’ll see you then, but while you’re waiting, you can examine the filtered emailing system we’ve discussed today by signing up for a free 10 day trial with Ashop.